English

5-Coloring Reconfiguration of Planar Graphs with No Short Odd Cycles

Combinatorics 2024-12-06 v3

Abstract

The coloring reconfiguration graph Ck(G)\mathcal{C}_k(G) has as its vertex set all the proper kk-colorings of GG, and two vertices in Ck(G)\mathcal{C}_k(G) are adjacent if their corresponding kk-colorings differ on a single vertex. Cereceda conjectured that if an nn-vertex graph GG is dd-degenerate and kd+2k\geq d+2, then the diameter of Ck(G)\mathcal{C}_k(G) is O(n2)O(n^2). Bousquet and Heinrich proved that if GG is planar and bipartite, then the diameter of C5(G)\mathcal{C}_5(G) is O(n2)O(n^2). (This proves Cereceda's Conjecture for every such graph with degeneracy 3.) They also highlighted the particular case of Cereceda's Conjecture when GG is planar and has no 3-cycles. As a partial solution to this problem, we show that the diameter of C5(G)\mathcal{C}_5(G) is O(n2)O(n^2) for every planar graph GG with no 3-cycles and no 5-cycles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2208.02228,
  title  = {5-Coloring Reconfiguration of Planar Graphs with No Short Odd Cycles},
  author = {Daniel W. Cranston and Reem Mahmoud},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.02228},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures, corrects a few errors in the previous version